Syndication

Manipulating juries, moral hypocrisy, and apologies

This article about toying with jurors' emotions is very good, not just for trial lawyers but for anyone, including salespeople, who try to manipulate people's emotions in order to persuade them. You often hear sales trainers teaching their students to go for the prospective buyer's pain or fear, because, when a person is in pain or scared, they are more likely to buy a solution (which, of course, the salesperson is selling). This may not be a very good piece of advice. One point of this article from The Jury Expert is that you cannot predict what will happen when you get someone to feel an emotion.

Despite the legal system's conventional story that our judicial process is devoid of emotions and based on pure reason (Bandes, 1999), attorneys have intuited the role of emotion in jurors' verdict decisions. Attorneys attempt to elicit emotions in jurors during opening and closing statements, or through the use of emotionally disturbing evidence. These attempts might, however, cause unintended changes to the way jurors process or interpret trial evidence. As psychologists, it is not our job to argue that emotion can (or should) ever be divorced from legal decision-making. Instead, we argue that it is important for attorneys to understand how emotion might change jurors' thinking processes in ways that attorneys might not expect. First, we explain how different types of emotional evidence influence jurors' verdicts, highlighting instances in which emotional evidence influences verdicts in the opposite direction that one would expect. Second, we explain how social psychological and neuroscience

research about emotion in general can be applied to jury decision-making to inform attorneys about the less expected effects this evidence might have on how jurors process and interpret evidence in the trial. For a more extensive examination of these issues see Salerno and Bottoms (2009).

Americans have been bombarded with examples of powerful people acting like the rules don't apply to them. From governors to corporate executives to athletes--there seems to be a new example of poor judgment every week. Is there an upward trend in moral hypocrisy among powerful people? As a communication consultant, I am interested in the ritual that often follows these transgressions: the public apology. Why do the powerful turn to public apologies for leniency? Apologies can provide closure, forgiveness and, ultimately, clear a path for the company or person to rebuild their reputation. What is the social psychology behind these two simple words, I'm sorry? Why do some apologies work and some fail, or even backfire?